Sunday, March 15, 2015

The week before last at the University of
California, Irvine, the legislative branch of the student government voted to
ban the display of the U.S. flag and other national flags in the lobby adjacent
to the offices of the student government.The rationale was that the U.S. flag “constructs paradigms of conformity
and sets homogenized standards”, inhibiting “freedom of speech, in a space that
aims to be as inclusive as possible”.

The ban sparked outrage and accusations
of treachery and a lack of patriotism, a veto from the student president, and a
rebuke from the UC Irvine Chancellor.

My own initial take was that the student
legislative action didn’t seem like the best use of their resources, or the
smartest way of making a political statement.Issues of more immediate concern might be the privatization of the UC
system, the transfer of costs to students from the public, and calls to
instrumentalize higher education in the U.S. and beyond.Unlike, for example, the divestment campaign,
there are no materially improved outcomes for anyone.And banning things for their “offensive”
nature seems like a substitute for a more trenchant and serious argument.In a strange way the students’ actions were
reminiscent of the administrators who increasingly use the invocation of
‘civility’ as a way to police the behavior of others, and suggest that the most
important thing about a university campus is that the goings-on there offend the fewest people possible.

For these reasons, the ban left the
students looking a bit silly.

But the reaction from the public was
typically hysterical, with people slinging around accusations of treachery and
decrying what they saw as an appalling lack of patriotism on campuses.The student legislators also earned
themselves a rebuke
from the UC Irvine Chancellor, Howard Gillman.

The Chancellor’s message offered a
wholesale repudiation of the students’ actions, decrying them as the behavior
of an unrepresentative minority.The
Chancellor began by noting that on any university campus one might expect to
hear views that are “unconventional and even outrageous”.The Chancellor’s formulation suggested that
there is some relationship between the action of questioning—an action
fundamental to the purpose of universities—and behavior that is “outrageous”,
and by extension somehow unacceptable.

Later in his letter, Chancellor Gillman
made the jump from disingenuousness to outright stupidity.It was “outrageous and indefensible”, he
wrote, that these students “would question the appropriateness of displaying
the American flag on this great campus”.Gillman is himself an academic, and one might therefore have expected a
greater degree of understanding about the role of universities in civic life.

Universities are designed to be spaces
for people to explore and as much as might be possible, act on questions of
moral, philosophical, and material importance.The purpose of a university is to create a sphere of critical
intellectual inquiry shielded from the over-mighty hand of the state and its
ability to intimidate and curtail thought.They are places where no questions should be off-limits and where
students should be able to—indeed, perhaps encouraged to—question the rituals
of obeisance our larger society pays to brittle, dangerous national myths.

Gillman’s concluding remarks illustrated
the need for critical thought.He
proclaimed grandly, “[UC Irvine is] an institution created by the world’s
greatest democracy in order to serve this democracy, and we feel privileged to
be able to serve the cause of freedom and progress under the American flag”.

This simple-minded and frankly quite
ignorant reading of history by a university Chancellor demonstrates the
pervasiveness of the fatuous and destructive patriotism that characterizes much
of our national thinking.

The idea that the U.S. is the “world’s
greatest democracy” is the stuff of all-too-easily spoofed political speeches,
not of serious conversation, and demands some scrutiny.

By what measure is the U.S. the “world’s
greatest democracy”?

We have a voting system in which a
national candidate with the most votes can lose the election to a candidate
with fewer votes.We have an antiquated
“first past the post” voting system that limits us to choosing between only two
parties, keeps small parties marginal, and can result in one party winning the
majority of the votes across the country and winning fewer seats in our
Congress. We have one legislative body
that gives as much representation to a state with a million people as to
California with its nearly 40 million inhabitants.We have our election on a week-day, and don’t
grant people a voting holiday, and in many states moves are afoot to
disenfranchise large numbers of voters, using methods associated with some of
the many bleak and unjust moments in our country’s history.

We have a democracy that gives precious
little to its people.Instead of
recognizing the equality of citizens, or even any aspiration towards equality,
we have a political framework that spurns the opportunity to provide public
welfare in favour of fetishizing economic inequality.We give corporations rights while rigging the
system against our middle and working classes.

And well might students question the idea
of serving “the cause of freedom and progress under the American flag”.

Our country has a long history of
colonialism and imperialism.Beginning
in 2001, under the American flag and in the name of our values, our country
developed a program of terror and torture, in which people were abducted and
held without trial, and subjected to extraordinary cruelty and
degradation.Our leaders who engineered
these acts of state terrorism, and the functionaries who carried them out have
since been shielded from punishment.

In 2003, our country launched and illegal
war of aggression, pummeling the people of another nation with a bombardment
meant to “shock and awe”.In the course
of a colonial-style occupation, our government destroyed the infrastructure of
that country, gutted its already damaged civic institutions, and turned
mercenaries loose on its streets, retreating into an armed encampment derided
as the “emerald city”.

Our country grants unconditional backing
to the government in Israel, one of the world’s last colonial regimes, as well
as to the authoritarian monarchy in Saudi Arabia.Our President uses a “disposition matrix”,
what amounts to a lethal profiling system, to murder people abroad without
trial.And massive rogue intelligence
agencies vacuum up citizens’ information without oversight.Even when it becomes known that such agencies
have lied to Congress and the public, their leadership goes unpunished and
their behavior unchecked.

And none of these behaviours are without
precedent.But what they make clear is
that we are not the world’s greatest democracy.Given the ascendancy of the American plutocracy and the strength of our
terrorist military-intelligence complex, it’s questionable to what extent we
remain a democracy.

To those who would argue that student
government is not the place to debate matters of this scale, I would offer the
reminder that students are the people who will have to live the longest and
contend the hardest with the world being created at this moment.It is also worth considering that while much
of our country buried its head in the sand, students have issued some of the
first calls to action about critical issues in our country’s recent history,
whether the Vietnam War, Civil Right, apartheid
in South Africa, Israeli colonialism, and the economic inequality that
increasingly defines our own society.

Few people today would argue that
prosecuting the war in Vietnam was in the public interest.And outside of the right wing of the
Republican Party, opponents of civil rights in the 1960s would find few
defenders.The Republican Party’s
embrace of South Africa’s National Party, and its designation of Nelson Mandela
as an enemy of the state are decisions that have not weathered time well.And I suspect that in a decade or two,
criticism of our unbending support for Israeli colonialism will look similarly
prescient.

The students’ efforts to ban national
flags doesn’t get at any single issue, and isn’t the best way of making the
point they seem to have in mind.But
their broader points about the nature of U.S. power in the world, and what the
flag represents for many are well-taken.And the snarling response they received both from the public at large
and from university administrators charged with maintaining the intellectual
integrity of the University of California is a strong indicator that the issues
they have raised need to be debated, and not dismissed as “indefensible”
criticism.

Wednesday, March 11, 2015

Tom Cotton is the Senator from Arkansas behind the
letter—signed by 47 of his colleagues—designed to derail U.S. negotiations with
Iran by way of provoking hostilities with that country, long a fantasy of the
neoconservatives whose deadened mental and moral carapaces remain unscathed by
the disasters they launched in Afghanistan and Iraq.

There are a variety of reasons why the political
right remains intent on waging wars that have no discernible benefit for the
public interest. In the first place,
they are beholden to radical religious fundamentalists who have a variety of
beliefs about the relationship between a catastrophic war in the Middle East
and the end of the world. Such beliefs also
help to explain the unconditional backing for Israel, which does so little good
for U.S. and Israeli citizens, never mind the people who suffer under Israeli
colonialism.

Others on the political right are unapologetic
proponents of a revitalized American Empire.
American exceptionalism and hubris have long been characteristics of our
international conduct, and explain many of our current difficulties today. Our own nation’s emergence in its present
geographical reform was the result of a colonial and often genocidal westward
march. We were briefly a formal imperial
power, and waged vicious colonial campaigns in the Philippines to maintain a
manifestly unjust rule.

In the latter part of the twentieth century, our
country engaged in the violent and illegal overthrow of governments—many democratic,
others not—around the world, particularly when those governments had the
temerity to question our often-blinkered national security diktats, or sought
to redress the inequality our embrace of a destructive capitalism generated in
their own countries.

Since 9/11, these proponents of American imperialism
have pushed for the use of violence and terrorism to re-make the world in our
own image. The rights and wrongs of such
a project aside, the model that they wish to transplant is looking increasingly
corrupt at home.

We live in a massively unequal society, in which
corporate interests are essentially tearing up the features of democratic
governance by asking their hired guns to confer citizenship rights on
corporations. At the same time,
right-wingers in Congress are attempting to strip voting rights from actual citizens across the country. And they are waging a guerrilla campaign
against government, sabotaging its social democratic functions at every turn to
bring to life their despicable lie that “government doesn’t work”.

But they are more than willing to make government
work for their paymasters. And this
toxic relationship was very much on display when, the day after Senator Cotton
and his colleagues launched their campaign to sabotage negotiations and
increase the likelihood of conflict with Iran, the
Senator attended an “‘Off the record and strictly non-attribution’ event
with the National Defense Industrial Association, a lobbying and professional
group for defense contractors”.

The
Intercept reported that “the NDIA is composed of executives
from major military business such as Northrup Grumman, L-3 Communications,
ManTech International, Boeing, Oshkosh Defense and Booz Allen Hamilton”.

In other words, after firing the first salvo of a
renewed effort to draw his country into war with Iran, Senator Cotton—who
has argued that journalists reporting on the abuses of the national security
state should be prosecuted—went to an event with the key industry players
set to benefit the most from such a war.
This illustrates another, even more pernicious reason for the constant
warmongering of the political right in the United States: that there are
interests in our country that make a great deal of money from war, particularly
when that war is privatized.

Not only do taxpayer dollars flow to arms companies—merchants
and proponents of death and destruction whose trade should be sharply
controlled if not curtailed—but to the security contractors who increasingly
take a prominent role in our conduct of imperial wars, and whose actions proved
so reprehensible and destructive in Iraq.

What Cotton and his colleagues are doing here is
reminiscent of language used to describe earlier war crimes. They are engaged in what looks like a “conspiracy
to wage aggressive war”, by sabotaging treaties, slinging around
unsubstantiated accusations about Iran’s nuclear program, working with state terrorists
like Benjamin Netanyahu, and working with arms companies. No voter of any political persuasion will
benefit from a war of the likes that Cotton and his colleagues seem to be
contemplating.

And yet under George W. Bush, such wars became the centerpiece
of the Republican Party’s international efforts. Theirs is a criminal enterprise, designed to
kill large numbers of people in defiance of international law, in a manner
calculated to imperil U.S. citizens and destabilize the entire world. It is a criminal enterprise which will also
enrich people and corporations that make money from war.

Senator Tom Cotton and his colleagues are
war-criminals in the making, and must be recognized as such by their
constituents and U.S. citizens more broadly, so that we can put a halt to their
warmongering before their actions are able to claim the lives of U.S and
Iranian citizens, and those of other countries that would be affected by the
fallout from the violent world order that these people would usher in.

Tuesday, March 10, 2015

This week, a group of Republican Senators drafted a
letter to the national leadership in Iran in what can only be described as a
blatant effort to sabotage negotiations about that country’s nuclear program
and increase the likelihood of war.

The
letter, signed by Republican Party extremists—in this case, 46 Senators—would
be almost comical for its crudeness, did the stupidity of its signatories and
the sheer destructiveness of its goals not portend so poorly for the fate of
our country in the hands of such people.

The letter is essentially an attempt to derail
negotiations by insinuating to the Iranian government that any agreement it
reaches with President Obama would be repudiated by a future Republican
administration or Congress.

The Republican goon squad opened their salvo in a
manner calculated to insult the intelligence of its recipients:

“It has come to our attention while observing your
nuclear negotiations with our government that you may not fully understand our
constitutional system….For example, the president may serve only two 4-year terms,
whereas senators may serve an unlimited number of 6-year terms. As applied today, for instance, President Obama
will leave office in January 2017, while most of us will remain in office well
beyond then—perhaps decades”.

The
Iranian cabinet, it should be said, consists of some fairly well-educated
people. The President has a PhD from
Glasgow Caledonian University in Scotland.
The Minister of Foreign Affairs has degrees from San Francisco State and
the University of Denver, with a doctorate in International Relations. The Minister of Science, Research and
Technology studied at MIT. And so
on. These are people who have a working
knowledge of the world and the systems of government within it.

It is not only insulting, but embarrassing for our
own country, that 46 Senators would operate under the assumption that their
willful—indeed gleeful—ignorance of the world beyond our country’s boundaries
is shared by people in other governments.
While you’ll find ready caricatures of the U.S. floating around in most
countries, Americans and their politicians are unique in depth of their disdain
for and depth of their ignorance of other peoples and other governments. This ignorance—and the ills that flow from it—are
a result of the half-witted doctrine of “American exceptionalism” that shapes
far too much of our foreign policy.

But if we move beyond the condescending and
insulting assumptions of the letter, to its substance, it gets even more
troubling, both because of its own
inadequate understanding of U.S. government and law, but because of what it
suggests about the international conduct of the United States.

The Senators wrote, “We will consider any agreement
regarding your nuclear weapons program that is not approved by the Congress as
nothing more than an executive agreement between President Obama and Ayatollah
Khamenei. The next president could
revoke such an executive agreement with the stroke of a pen and future
Congresses could modify the terms of the agreement at any time”.

Their essential warning is that no country in the
world should take seriously treaties signed by the U.S. government. They are suggesting that any moves towards
peace will be swiftly undone by right-wing fanatics who are intent on exporting
violence that serves no recognizable public purpose to any constituency in the
United States. They are making it clear
that they intend to wage a guerrilla war against the President who—in their
Koch-fuelled hatred and racism—they believe to be illegitimate, and that our
international legal obligations will be casualties of that war.

The Republican strategy is to attack the functioning
of government and now diplomacy, to gum up the wheels of our institutions and
our economy, to engineer the failure of programs and initiatives, and then to
claim that “Government doesn’t work” and to point the finger at Democrats.

When voters inexplicably reward this treacherous
behavior, Republicans then promptly set about making government work very well
indeed—for the ultra-rich and for the corporate interests that bankrolled their
guerrilla war and paid for their sabotage, and in this case, for the warmongers.

It was certainly illustrative of the dysfunction of
our current politics, which empowers fanatic right-wingers on the basis of
corporate personhood and rights. And it
has undoubtedly made clear to the world that many politicians in the United
States have definitively elevated ignorance and sociopathy to election-winning
virtues.

It is clear now that negotiations over Iran’s
nuclear program (the Republican Senators reference a “nuclear weapons program”
which does not, by any evidence produced from anywhere other than Benjamin
Netanyahu’s backside, exist) are proceeding between rational groups in the
United States and Iran. Both of these
groups—comprising Democrats and a handful of more traditional Republicans in
the United States, and the core of the Iranian administration—have their own
agendas, but appear to be seriously committed to negotiations, and seem to
understand that a settlement is infinitely preferable to the alternatives.

But both are hemmed in by nationalist,
fundamentalist fanatics on their right flanks.
Both of these fringe elements—elements which threaten to dominate in
their respective countries—suffer from a total inability or unwillingness to
understand different perspectives. In
the case of the fanatics in the U.S.—of whom we have a bird’s eye view—they seem
to lack some basic elements of human compassion, and seem unmoved by the
prospect of unleashing a war on Iranians, with all of the catastrophe that
would entail for the people of that country, in the region surrounding it, and
ultimately for the United States.

And they have transplanted the methods which have
served them so well in increasing economic and political inequality in the
United States into the arena of foreign policy.
The consequences of right-wing fanatics being able to shape both our
foreign and domestic policy are likely to be devastating for U.S. citizens, and
catastrophic for the global community. We
have seen how small groups of fundamentalist fanatics can destablise the world
and cause great violence. And we’ve seen
how U.S. imperialism—even in the hands of “moderate” leadership—can wreak havoc
and generate global instability.

In the modern Republican Party, we might see such
fanatics take control of an imperial state with superpower capacities. It’s a truly frightening combination.

Sunday, March 1, 2015

Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has arrived in the United States.Ahead of an election in his home country,
Netanyahu was invited by the Republican Party to address Congress to make the
case for deliberately raising tensions with Iran, and torpedoing the prospect
of a settlement over the country’s nuclear program.

When
Netanyahu appears before Congress, it will be with little credibility.The subject of investigations
in Israel, the Prime Minister has also been alleged to have lied about the
intelligence he presented to the United Nations in 2012 about the development
of an Iranian nuclear weapons program.On that occasion, Netanyahu took his war-mongering to New York waving a
diagram that looked like it had been thrown together for a first-grade science
fair, albeit using logic that would have left any first-grader with eyebrows
raised.

A
key point is that the Netanyahu will be attacking diplomatic efforts in an
attempt to substitute violence for negotiation, and that when he launches his
attack, we know that he has a history of dishonesty.

More
disturbing altogether is the fact that Republicans in Congress saw fit to
invite to the United States a man who is essentially a practitioner and
proponent of state terror.

It
is often claimed that Netanyahu is the leader of the only democracy in the
Middle East, as though the fact that the United States has created a region so
devoid of representative institutions by propping up assorted dictators and
autocrats is a point of pride.The claim
also ignores the reality that Israel can hardly be considered to be a democracy
so long as it possesses colonies in Gaza and the West Bank.

Netanyahu
has repeatedly launched wars against his country’s colonies, using a policy of
deliberately withholding adequate food supplies, creating tremendous
hardship.His regime practices the
typical colonial policy of collective punishment, trying to defeat
anti-colonial fighters—and they are such, whether or not we approve of every
one of their actions—by punishing the population at large, killing thousands of
civilians, many of them children, destroying housing and ensuring that utilities
do not reach the colonized population.

In
short, the Israeli regime has used colonial warfare to engineer humanitarian
crises.And by keeping its colonies
perpetually on the breaking point, fuelled with sinister rhetoric, not only is
the regime sailing
perilously close to articulating a policy of ethnic cleansing, but is
ensuring that local authorities in those colonies lack the power to support
their constituents, while lumbering with the burden of responsibility for the
state of affairs the Israeli regime has actually created.

As
though to trumpet the impunity with which his regime wields state terror,
Netanyahu has also repeatedly and deliberately attacked the United Nations as
it operates in his colonies, its task being to bring relief and monitor what is
clearly an untenable and morally indefensible situation.

These
Israeli policies—the use of collective punishment, the deliberate
impoverishment of a community, attacks on the United Nations, and the
maintenance of colonies—are the actions of a rogue state.The leader of such a state should not be the
recipient of an invitation to address Congress.The Hague might be a more appropriate venue for an appearance by
Netanyahu, where he should be joined by a bevy of current and former U.S.
administration officials complicit in a variety of international crimes.

He’s
already voiced those concerns—and apparently lied while doing so.The truth is, Netanyahu, and the community of
neocons and fundamentalists in the United States are the far greater threat to
Israel.The reason Israel finds itself worrying
about its survival has much to do with its colonial policies, the series of
injustices the colonial regime has perpetrated against colonial populations
over the past decades, its flouting of international law, and its close
relationship with the United States, given the often-terroristic foreign policy
of the latter government.

In
short, the United States does Israel no favours by writing blank checks to
prop-up a colonial regime that not only inflicts unspeakable damage on its
colonized population, but also imperils its own society.I for one hope that when they vote in the
coming elections, Israelis recognize that their colonialism and terror will be
their own downfall, and remove those like Netanyahu who support state terror
and colonialism from positions of power.

About Me

I am from Northern California, and am the fifth generation of my family to have lived in the Golden State. Now I live next-door in the Silver State, where I research and write about colonialism and decolonization in Africa, teach European, African, environmental, and colonial history, and write this blog, mostly about politics, sometimes about history, and occasionally about travels or research.